The appearance of Stonehenge has been likened to a herd of elephant browsing on the Plain.  The simile is good and is particularly applicable to its aspect from the Amesbury road—­the least imposing of the approaches.  The straight white highway, and the fact that the Stones are a little below the observer, detract very much from the impressiveness of the scene.  The usual accompaniments of a visit, a noisy and chattering crowd of motorists, eager to rush round the enclosure quickly, to purchase a packet of postcards and be off; the hut for the sale of the cards, and the absurdly incongruous, but (alas!) necessary, policeman, go far to spoil the visit for the more reverent traveller.  But if he will go a little way to the south and watch the gaunt shapes against the sky for a time and thus realize their utter remoteness from that stream of evanescent mortality beneath, the unknown ages that they have stood here upon the lonely waste, the dynasties, nay, the very races, that have come and conquered and gone, and the almost certainty that the broad metalled highway which passes close to them will in turn disappear and give place, while they still stand, to the turf of the great green expanse around; then the awe that surrounds Stonehenge will be felt and understood.

The early aspect of Stonehenge was far more elaborate than as we see it to-day, and the avenues that led to the inner circles and the smaller and outer rings have to a large extent disappeared.  The stones are enclosed in a circular earthwork 300 feet across.  The outer circle of trilithons, 100 feet in diameter, is composed of monoliths of sandstone originally four feet apart and thirty in number.  Inside this circle is another of rough unhewn stones of varying shapes and sizes.  Within this again, forming a kind of “holy place,” are two ellipses—­the outer of trilithons five in number and the inner of blue stones of the same geological formation as the rough stones of the outer circle.  Of these there were originally nineteen.

[Illustration:  PLAN OF STONEHENGE (RESTORED).]

Near the centre is the so-called “altar stone,” over fifteen feet long; in a line with this, through the opening of the ellipse, is the “Friar’s Heel,” a monolith standing outside the circles.  The larger stones or “sarsens” are natural to the Marlborough Downs, but the unhewn or “blue” stones are mysterious.  They are composed of a kind of igneous rock not found anywhere near Wiltshire.  A suggestion by Professor Judd is that they are ice-borne boulders accidentally deposited on the Plain during the southward drift of the great ice cap.  One of the sarsen stones is stained with copper oxide, and this fact has been taken to point to Stonehenge being erected somewhere in the Bronze Age—­that is, not longer ago than 2000 B.C.  Excavations about twenty years ago brought to light a number of stone tools, fragments of pottery, coins and bones.  Belonging to a long period of time, the finds were inconclusive.  It is quite possible that the ring of rough blue stones were erected by a primitive race of stone men and that a continuous tradition of sanctity clung to the spot until, in the time of those heirs and successors of theirs who used bronze weapons and were acquainted with the rudiments of engineering, the imposing temple that we call Stonehenge came into being.